Den 2X

Are you stuck trying to figure out how to attract customers to build your freelance writing career?

If you’re taking any old gig, it’s hard to get any real traction. You have to constantly market yourself, and never acquire expertise that helps you raise your rates and grow your income.

The solution: Learn how to attract customers who give you clips that will impress the best clients in your chosen industry niches, like I teach my Den 2X students.

Sit down right now and make a list of your 10-20 top prospects. What great-paying markets would you write for? Think big! For me, this list includes Vanity Fair, Costco, and American Express (wrote for the latter two in the past, but would love to get back in!).

Once you have that list, you need to figure out who you could write for now. Do it right, and those great clients will be contacting you. Wouldn’t that be sweet?

For some freelance writers, it seems like asking for referrals and selling comes easy. They have a huge network of people they’ve cultivated relationships with. Their network hooks them up with new clients. And it’s easy for the same freelance writers to talk about their business in any situation, and get referrals.

If you’re afraid to ask for referrals, you’ve probably heard that fraidy-cat freelance writer voice inside your head. You know, the one trying to convince you that:

People will think you’re desperate

You’re running some kind of scam

You can’t possibly provide a service valuable enough to help in any meaningful way

That cat needs to go. It took me a long time to figure this out. But when I finally did, I got a response in 10 minutes, a potential project, and scored another referral for more work. Here’s how I did it:

A lot of freelance writers have a poverty mentality. I hear a lot of, “I’m just hoping to make a fraction of what I made at my day job. I need to earn enough from my writing income to survive.”

That’s one mindset of some freelance writers. But there’s another way to approach your freelance business.

If you take the attitude that your freelance writing income is unlimited, you can see your income explode.

That’s what happened to Canadian freelance writer Sylvie Tremblay, who recently graduated from my Den 2X Income Accelerator. After a year in the program, which starts with making a mindset shift to believe in yourself, she tripled her writing income, going from subsistence, paycheck-to-paycheck living to having money in the bank, traveling, and feeling financially secure.

Does it seem like freelance writers live in two different worlds? Sometimes, it can feel that way.

In one world, writers are excited if they can move up from $10 a blog post to $15. They write entire websites or e-books for a couple hundred bucks. I like to call this the Underworld of Freelance Writing.

In the other, writers land four- and even five-figure contracts with terrific clients to write interesting, fun projects. They get so many great offers, they can’t take them all. And they get paid $200 a blog post, or more, and $35,000 and up to ghost a book.

These writers can afford to take vacations. They have retirement accounts. They eat out. Why? Because they have an entirely different approach to their freelance writing business than writers who earn peanuts.

If you’re interested in earning real money from freelancing, let’s take a look at what makes the difference: